A little piece of me…

Getting Personal – Eating disorder progress…

Progress is hard I find. Well, I think I find it hard to feel like I’m making progress even when maybe I am. I still have good days and bad days, I think that will continue for a while yet but most days I feel pretty good even when I’m not able to control when I’m eating. When I don’t feel gross or horrible about my eating, that is progress for me.

There’s a few things that have been helping with my progress, one of them is seeing a psychiatrist, one of them is seeing a dietician, and one of them is reading a book called Overcoming Bulimia Nervosa and Binge-Eating Disorder. Because I can’t see my psychiatrist and dietician every day the book is the thing I’m clinging to at the moment.

There are several steps to the book and each step has been created so that it builds on the step before it. So far I am up to Step 3.

Step 1 is to write down everything you eat, what time you eat it, where and to add context, for example “I had an argument with mum and now want to eat this block of chocolate”, that sort of thing.

Step 2 is to plan your meals and snacks each week, but the idea here isn’t to necessarily make it a healthy eating plan, more just something you know you can stick to. So if you know you’re going to crave that bar of chocolate in the afternoon, then maybe you allow yourself to have one guilt-free.

Step 3 which is all about distractions is the step that I’m up to now. I am struggling with it. I had to come up with a list of tasks that might distract me when I feel the urge to binge, and I actually wrote a couple of lists. One for when I’m just around home say, and one for when I’m at work. But I am struggling with this step in that, the other day as an example, I was craving chocolate and I used those distractions on my list but then felt massively guilty (and so wanting to binge even more!) because I did virtually no work because I was too busy distracting myself! I’m sure that’s not conducive to getting better, so I’m not really sure what to do but I’ll start with revisiting that distraction list and see if maybe there’s something else I can do to distract myself.

So I am making progress, though it is sometimes painfully slow and frustrating. And if you have any ideas about distractions I could use at work I would be open to hearing suggestions!